Our sweet little web based Aerial Imagery and UAV Flight Tracker with Ortho-Mosaic/GIS/KMZ Tile Builder. Beautiful Orthophotos!

Hello fellow UAVers,
dronemapper.com
My UAV partner (Ross) and I have been working on a project that we'd love to get some feedback and additional ideas for. Our intention is to allow free access to this web based tool and also a really cheap subscription model per month (think $4 range) to support hosting costs and the large amount of cpu processing power needed to generate maps. The free users will get all the same features but lower resolution imagery and possibly less accurate georeferenced tiles/tiffs/added watermarks to support the site. No ads.

Our software and backend servers use tons of different open source packages to complete the process of georeferencing and building image mosaics. We are also trying to offer an "easy to use" UI to view each flight and all the associated data. We really hope you enjoy our ideas! We are planning to open the site up to beta users by request in a month or so. Please keep an eye out for more information on that.

We've been having some problems getting our own flight systems up and running, ranging from a bad MUX on an APM 1 (thanks for fixing!), APM2 delays, and code issues with the Tri-Copter platform. This has prevented us from getting amazing imagery on our own at this point. :( Lucky, the awesome guys at Petryx UAV posted a ton of sample imagery which is so cool! Pteryx FTP Sample Imagery

We can't wait to open the site to beta users so you can test your own imagery and flight paths, hopefully at that point we will have our own platform up and running!

So, here we go -- some screenshots and comments:

Upload your flight imagery and Ardulog/GPX/Petryx/CSV log file.
Imagery and Flight Processing Queue
Imagery Dashboard w/ Flight Path, GeoTIFF served via Geoserver, Blended and Georeferenced Mosaics

Same as above, different flight.

Georeferenced View w/ Google Earth API - Shows Tiles, Flight Path

Second Part of Georefenced View - Shows GeoTiff Mosaic Preview and Metadata

Third Part of Georeferenced View - Shows Additional Maps

Blended Mosaic

Our Tricopter platform. Quadcopter and also Skywalker platforms we've been testing!

Quadcopter w/ IR Powershot a490 Camera

We would love to hear some questions and comments!

Thanks for reading and thanks for your support,

DM Team (JP and Ross)

@Krzysztof Bosak Thanks for that information! speaking of snow, I am off to go shred some powder on the sled. :D and I want to send a special thanks to Pteryx UAV! btw, I sent you an email with some additional information and images/metadata.

@Rigel Definitely will do, my partner in the project Ross is also starting to notice some of the issues you mentioned. Also the lack of <compass> reading in the gpx logs, there is a <course> tag but sometimes they are not the same. It would also be nice if the timestamp in the file was a true gps timestamp! Not an offset from midnight. (day of flight) We have two methods to parse the Ardulogs.. one is gpx and the other is the raw log file.

I can't wait to get the APM2 and see if the sensors/timing is better. Are you on APM1?

@Johanna Born Many thanks! We hope to have the service up and running soon and fully expect to work out many bugs. :) We are a two man team at this point. I have seen the MAVinci site before and think it would be a great idea to support your Autopilot as well. I will post some results from your sample imagery soon. Thx Again

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JP February 17, 2012 at 4:50am

@Krzysztof Bosak Thanks for that information! speaking of snow, I am off to go shred some powder on the sled. :D and I want to send a special thanks to Pteryx UAV! btw, I sent you an email with some additional information and images/metadata.

@Rigel Definitely will do, my partner in the project Ross is also starting to notice some of the issues you mentioned. Also the lack of <compass> reading in the gpx logs, there is a <course> tag but sometimes they are not the same. It would also be nice if the timestamp in the file was a true gps timestamp! Not an offset from midnight. (day of flight) We have two methods to parse the Ardulogs.. one is gpx and the other is the raw log file.

I can't wait to get the APM2 and see if the sensors/timing is better. Are you on APM1?

@Johanna Born Many thanks! We hope to have the service up and running soon and fully expect to work out many bugs. :) We are a two man team at this point. I have seen the MAVinci site before and think it would be a great idea to support your Autopilot as well. I will post some results from your sample imagery soon. Thx Again
Johanna Claussen February 17, 2012 at 4:31am

This is a really nice project and I think the community will benefit a lot if you are able to offer such a service!

If you want to test your system with some more sample images from UAVs, please feel free to process our sample imagery: ftp://mavinci.de/
Rigel February 17, 2012 at 12:17am

I'm not sure if this is an issue others have run into, but I've noticed that the APM on board log clock is running slow. Now, I know that it's supposed to be based on GPS satellite time, but I've flown multiple flights which confirm this problem. This will be a real issue for those of you wanting to synchronize your pictures to your logs.
Rigel February 17, 2012 at 12:02am

Very interesting work. Keep us posted on your progress and feel free to let me know if you need a guinea pig.
T3

Krzysztof Bosak February 16, 2012 at 4:42pm

Wow.

BTW this REDSNOW case is really nasty, crab angles some 60 deg. Visually it stopped moving on the sky on one leg and we aborted the mission, 9m/s wind plus very lightly loaded and uptrimmed Pteryx was a no-go condition since the beginning.
JP February 16, 2012 at 5:17am

Good luck Andre! Thx. Keep me posted and we'll refer back to this thread for interest beta users. :)
Andre S February 15, 2012 at 11:57pm

JP, thanks a lot for those pointers and adding more info to the website. Good luck with your project! Once the snow melts here I hope I'll be able to produce some data myself.. Cheers, Andre
JP February 15, 2012 at 6:50am

Hi Andre, Thanks

check out this link for a paper and some ideas: http://144.206.159.178/FT/CONF/16432614/16432629.pdf

Also, I posted some updated links on the dronemapper.com splash page about what technologies we've used and also interesting projects we've found along the way. Maybe this link will be of more help regarding feature detection, etc: http://opencv.itseez.com/trunk/doc/tutorials/features2d/feature_hom... <- it helped inspire some ideas for me.

This link is the right idea only you need to have it done without projection. ie a flat mosaic

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8089641/opencv-findhomography-issue

Hope this helps,

Thanks JP
Andre S February 15, 2012 at 6:42am

Hi,

Interesting tool/concept that is badly needed. I was wondering, being new to aerial photography/image stitching/georeferencing, is there any more detailed background information on your photo processing toolchain available? You mentioned a few things, such as opencv and what the display uses but I'm really interested in the processing part. In the middle and longterm I'm looking for a batch processing solution that ideally would not require any user interaction at all (maybe picking one reference point in a single picture, fixing that picture's orientation or so) and would scale to possibly a few hundred photos. Computing time itself would not be a limiting factor as long as the method is scalable (thinking of Hadoop MapReduce based algorithms). I actually remember I saw a paper on a related topic once but can't quite recall it.

Anyway.. interesting stuff, keep up the nice work. Guess you won't have trouble finding users for this thing here..

Cheers, Andre
JP February 15, 2012 at 5:19am

Hi Em Bu- Thanks for the link.

We have definitely looked at Palentier, it is great software and helped inspire this project along with diydrones/arducopter. :)

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